


in our bedroom after the war (or four times sam and ellen might’ve slept together – and one time they definitely didn’t)

by slybrunette



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-24
Updated: 2010-02-24
Packaged: 2017-10-15 04:47:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/157183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slybrunette/pseuds/slybrunette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>before. during. after. pick your poison. the cards are still going to fall the same way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in our bedroom after the war (or four times sam and ellen might’ve slept together – and one time they definitely didn’t)

**I.** _(Earth)_

 

She wears glasses she doesn’t need when she’s working; thin rectangular rims that remind him of a teacher he once knew. People take her seriously enough, for various reasons that aren’t worth repeating, and he tells her as much, one late night spent in the lab.

Her glasses lay abandoned on a flimsy pile of white papers, and her glass, filled to the brim with ambrosia, is front and center.

“It won’t work,” he tells her, a shake of his head, and he might as well be drawing one big ‘x’ through something they’ve just spent the better part of an hour and a half working on, never mind whatever she’d already been through with it.

Ellen’s at the point of being just drunk enough that she exaggerates her movements, so when she turns in her chair to face him, it’s more like a whirl. Papers almost dislodge and he puts out a hand to keep them from scattering. “And why the hell not?”

“Because Galen already tried this,” he points, underlines what he’s referring to in thick, dark ink, and returns her gaze looking anything but smug. “Which is why I said you should be doing this with Galen. Besides you, he’s made the most advances. He’s the one you should be talking to, not me.”

“Maybe I wanted a fresh perspective,” she replies, which is her way of acknowledging that, no, he’s not the smartest of them all and perhaps he shouldn’t be the one that she’s conferring with. He’s just the one that she _wants_ right now, and everyone knows all too well that Ellen does what she wants and frak anyone who takes issue with that.

No one’s taken much issue with her experiments in organic memory and reincarnation as of late, and as of this point in time, her hand along his bicep, he’s fairly sure that she’s itching for a fight or dissonance -- anything that isn’t passive or a form of placation – and Sam is just the right amount of foolish and unafraid for that type of thing.

He imagines the wind of his fingers through the curls in her hair when she leans forward. Her glasses are on again.

“You look like a frakkin’ schoolteacher,” he remarks, laughing even when it’s not all that funny (she is too but if you told her the sun would never rise again and their world might end – and it very well might in the not so distant future – she’d find something to laugh about; the problem lies in deciding what is real and what is nothing but skilled manipulation).

She pushes the bottle towards him.

“I don’t think that’s going to help.”

Ellen shrugs. “Can’t hurt.”

It’s four flights of stairs down from here, the drive home, and they’re playing with fragile concepts like life everlasting. Of course it can. He sends the bottle back, a wave of his hand that he’s fine, good even, and certainly won’t be taking chances with that tonight.

The look she gives him reminds him that there are _always_ alternatives with her. “Neither can this.”

Her mouth is a lot like a drink from the bottle, the shot of adrenaline that gets things moving again. It’s like breathing to Ellen, the most natural thing in the world, the way her hands slide across his shoulders and down, the way her tongue tangles with his or her leg brushes between his; to Sam it’s nothing more than possibilities mixed with consequences, ideas that need processing, and he’s not under the impression that she just dives into things – not strictly – but that she thinks through this things quicker and then deftly pushes them to the side, a whole fifteen steps ahead of him.

She’s not stupid, far from it, and that’s what makes the air of general disregard when it comes to sleeping with people who she knows are not her husband (he doesn’t know what number he is on that list and he really doesn’t want to know either; he hears things after all, they resemble nothing of fairytales) so damn scary and what makes her so dangerous. It’s all calculated before anyone else knows it’s going to happen.

This was always an eventuality, it was just preceded by waiting and second-guessing and ignorance.

His hands still catch in the fabric of her skirt when she climbs atop his lap, legs that drape over his own and hands finding purchase on his back and running over his short hair. She isn’t wearing any underwear and he isn’t wearing a watch.

They both have people to face at home.

Her teeth scratch across his lower lip and he kisses her anyways.

 

-

 

 **II.** _(Caprica)_

 

It had been a good game and she’d made her presence known easily in a packed bar.

“I’ve always liked ball players,” Ellen had said, outright, and there was no one who needed help filling in the blanks with regards to what she wanted.

(She held a drink in one hand and her wedding ring encircled the third finger of the other; it wasn’t hard to place what kind of woman she was, at least not to the casual observer, and it said something sad about the state of society – and maybe the state of his own life – that it filled him with nothing but familiarity).

This was what fame got you: recognition and cameras, praise and audiences with people who matter and people who don’t, women who claimed to just have been passing by with nervous smiles and still others who took you back to hotel rooms and tried to pretend that they were letting you in on something personal and important, not tawdry and desperate.

Sam placed her in the second camp in under two minutes.

He still let himself leave with her.

She surprised him first with the house.

(She surprised him last with “you can leave now” said from beneath the sheets that still smelled of sweat and sex, the way she dismissed him like the one-night stand he was – but that comes later.)

“My husband is a military man,” she told him, gesturing with an outstretched hand at the pictures that line the walls, several of them individually, fewer together. This was a tale older than he was. “Last I heard he was on Tauron. Or Sagittaron. I never know.”

Ellen runs her fingers along the insignia on his uniform, C-Bucs, and smiles. He’s heard the last name Tigh before, somewhere in the recesses of his mind, and he thinks maybe he’s seen her husband on the news. “Does he know?” He doesn’t know what possesses him to ask it.

“I didn’t marry a stupid man.” She laughs to herself. “Though if you’re asking whether or not he cares, I also didn’t marry a cold one.”

The edge of the bed connects with the back of his legs and she pushes him down onto it, palms on his chest, but doesn’t follow him. He watches her undo the ties around her neck, letting the front of her dress fall against her chest, revealing scalloped edges of a black bra and tanned shoulders. He watches her slide out of the rest of the dress, letting it become a pool of burgundy silk at her feet. She raises her eyes to scan his body, and he slips out of his own shirt, leaning back on his elbows. It’s a giant game of follow the leader and he’s not _it_.

“Good,” she appraises, straddling his hips a second later, spreading her fingers against the tense muscles of his abdomen.

Later (and this is the last, you know, this is it):

“I knew a man like you once,” she says, rolling onto her back and kicking the last edge of the comforter completely off the bed, letting it fall onto the floor with the rest of their clothes.

He wants to ask, he does, it’s just that his tongue sticks to his mouth in the moment, and then it passes.

“You can leave now.”

Sam finds that he can’t place her in either of those camps. He can’t place her at all.

 

-

 

 **III.** _(Battlestar Galactica)_

 

They’re talking settlements, they’re talking in finalities in such a way that used to be reserved for the always elusive _Earth_.

The destination has changed now. It alternately annoys and terrifies her.

He’s new, embroiled in a love triangle that he’s mostly unaware of, and she thinks that that sort of obliviousness might work in her favor. Usually, these things do, and she has quite a talent for improvisation if they don’t.

“You know, Captain Thrace never struck me as someone who was very good at relationships,” she remarks -- not that she’s ever paid all that much attention to Kara Thrace, other than to see what was obvious to even the blind about her romantic entanglements; Saul does though, this never-ending pissing contest that’s only recently come to a halt.

“Kara is…” there’s this look in his eye, the look like he could talk endlessly about this firecracker of a woman; this is what they call love. This is also what others call vulnerability. “Kara’s amazing.”

It’s too simplistic for the lengthy pause that preceded it and she calls him on it. “And…” she drawls, long and slow, fingers wet from the drink and skidding along the table she found him at – he had the expression of the abandoned and she has a gut feeling that he lit the fuse on the firecracker and ended up on the wrong side of it; such things are part of what you set yourself up for with that woman.

“Kara’s an enigma,” he finishes and the exhale that follows rings of surrender.

“Kara is like my husband.” Sam watches her then, instead of the table or the clock on the wall, he watches the way she moves, lets his eyes travel over slopes and sharp angles, and this is the part that Ellen’s always enjoyed the most. The slow realization of options and outcomes, positive and negative, the way his fingers twitch but do not reach. She crosses her legs, tries not to imagine the feel of those fingers on her skin and between her thighs. “They’re married to their job. Everyone else is secondary.”

“You mean every _thing_ else.”

“No I don’t.”

He’s new. Green. Naïve. Ignorant. All variations on the same idea. But he has to learn sometime that what he thinks he’s got he doesn’t really and thus the quicker he finds a way to deal with it the less it will chip away at him.

(Ellen’s not heartless, you know, and she doesn’t cheat because she doesn’t love Saul. It’s just Saul has a two-way loyalty, one to her and one to Bill Adama, and she doesn’t tend to win out. People deal in all sorts of ways.

This has always been hers. More and more it’s nothing but habit).

She rises from her chair, heels clicking against the hard floor of this old ship until she’s behind him, her hands on the back of his chair and, when she leans down, her breath is warm against his neck. “I’ve come to find that people are capable of infinitely many things. But if a combined three way effort from the Adama men hasn’t tamed her, then you certainly don’t have a prayer.”

He might shiver under her touch.

She might let her teeth skim her lower lip, two fingers under his jaw, and, while she’s certain her mouth tastes of ambrosia, his tastes like nothing and there’s something that feels distinctly wrong about that.

(This would surprise nobody – there is also something distinctly wrong about _that_ ).

The door is not locked.

 

-

 

 **IV.** _(New Caprica)_

Mistakes are often made during war. Here, often is a synonym for always.

Suicide bombings, friendly fire, plans gone awry – this pales in comparison, under any light. It doesn’t make it okay but she’s always been fond of the word better (as in everything’s better by the second drink, or the third, or the fourth; bars on Cloud Nine and laughter that could almost sound like the clinking of glasses).

So. There is her, naked on top of him, covered only by a sheet and the door stirs with the wind (he fixed that a week ago, him and Galen, in between planning the next futile attack with no end in sight; it’s the small triumphs here that begin to be important, amid the hopelessness and the devastation). His fingers move underneath, follow the line of her body, the side of her breast, the curve of her hip, down and across until she shifts above him and he groans.

“We’re going to try to hit one of their arsenals tomorrow. We got the blueprints from – wherever he gets them from.”

By now, she’s already making deals with John Cavil. This is important. “It won’t work.”

His hands stop their exploration of her breasts, the slow circle of his thumb against her nipple. “Why the hell not?”

“Because Saul already tried that.”

It is not her own special brand of diversion. It’s truth. She saves the lies, for the most part, for later, for the times where it isn’t the two of them wrapped up in each other. These times she prefers to pretend that this is somewhere, and _something_ , else – something controlled and calculated.

He sighs, long and deep, and she sinks onto him rather unceremoniously, listening to the noise it elicits from the back of his throat. She does not smile. There’s nothing at all pleasant about it.

(Somewhere in the distance, a shot rings out.

Her teeth sink into his shoulder.)

The door is not locked.

It doesn’t matter; there is no one looking for them.

 

-

 

 **V.** _(New York -- 2009)_

 

They meet in New York.

Her husband flies planes. Briefly, he had dipped his toes into that particular pool – it hadn’t worked out for him.

There is a war going on tens of thousands of miles away, and they meet in a drugstore in a crowded city.

“I’m sorry,” he says, after a full minute of trying to weigh the difference between the generic and the name brand in aisle 5, in between getting distracted by her, “but do I know you?”

She laughs. There is nothing particularly funny. “I think I’d remember someone like you.”

At the checkout counter, they are both stuck in line behind a woman armed with a stack of coupons, arguing with the cashier over each one denied, talking about the state of the economy and the world itself; Ellen has half a mind to tell her where to stick said coupons but doesn’t get the chance to before Sam’s talking again.

“It’s just – I’m not from here,” he starts; her hands wind around the handle of her basket, light bulbs and batteries, self-sufficiency written somewhere in all that. “I used to play basketball down in Washington.”

“State?”

“Capital.”

She nods. “I never was a fan of a sport.” She wets her lips. “The players on the other hand…”

The woman ahead of them wants to know why she can’t get fifty cents off of the can of Raid she’s buying.

Ellen’s patience wanes right along with the cashier’s. She considers the merits of stress relief and the not-so-common basketball player right in front of her and her hands tighten on the handle. She has worse ideas on a near daily basis. “I’m fairly sure I don’t know you. But I know this city.”

“Yeah?” He asks, raised eyebrow.

She meets his gaze. “Yes.”

Everything after the word ‘tour’ in his next sentence gets lost to her ears as she contemplates the logistics of confining that tour to her bedroom in the high rise that still bears signs of her husband’s rare presence.

Then she tells him she’s free at eight-fifteen on Wednesday, tells the woman in front of them that some people have better things to do than stand here all day, and hails a cab two minutes later.

His appearance on Wednesday is predictable.

Somehow, everything from the pressure of his fingers to the rhythm of his thrusts falls under that umbrella as well.

(“I swear I know you from somewhere,” he claims, one more.

She’s either getting too old for this or she’s starting to believe him. Neither alternative strikes her as very good).

 

-

 

 _fin._


End file.
